Directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado talk about how groundbreaking Shrek was 20 years ago — and how Puss in Boots: The Last Wish needed to evolve the franchise’s animation and humor for the 2020s.
“When the first Shrek movie came out, it was quite groundbreaking,” Joel Crawford, co-director of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, told Polygon in a recent interview. “With CG, it was so impressive [with] the detail that you could feel, and audiences were wowed by that chasing of photorealism. So in order to make, 20-something years later, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish feel like a fairy tale for our time, we said, We need to push it.”
And he and co-director Januel Mercado did. Unlike the four Shrek movies and the first Puss in Boots movie, which all take a standard approach to photorealism in lighting and design, The Last Wish is more stylized. The backgrounds are lush. The lighting looks less photographic and more like an impressionist painting. The movements are more exaggerated and eye-catching. It’s a massive departure from what audiences have come to expect from the Shrek franchise, but it was a departure the filmmakers were eager to take.
“It’s been over 10 years since the last Puss in Boots, and over 20 years since the first Shrek came out,” Mercado says.
